Veteran AT&T technician Mark Klein (see July 7, 2009) is startled when he receives an email informing him and his colleagues that a representative from the National Security Agency (NSA) will soon arrive to conduct “some kind of business.” Klein works at the Geary Street facility in San Francisco, helping provide Internet, VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol), and data transport between the US and the Far East. Klein and his supervisor, Don Henry, soon learn that one of their colleagues, one of AT&T’s senior “field support specialists” whom Klein will only identify as “Ski,” is to be interviewed by the NSA for a security clearance. Ski is slated to begin working in an NSA-operated “secure facility” at AT&T’s Folsom Street facility in San Francisco. [PBS Frontline, 5/15/2007; Klein, 2009, pp. 22-25] Klein later says of the NSA visit: “That struck me as a little odd to begin with, because I remember from back in the ‘70s, the NSA is not supposed to be doing domestic spying, so what were they doing in an AT&T company office? It struck me as odd, but I didn’t know anything more about it, so I just let it lie and waited for the guy to come.” Klein will later describe the NSA representative as “closemouthed and unsmiling, and he did his business.” Klein decides that the NSA visit was a one-time affair, and he thinks no more of it for the time being. [PBS Frontline, 5/15/2007]

The NSA’s secret room in the AT&T switching center. [Source: PBS]Veteran AT&T technician Mark Klein (see July 7, 2009) takes an informal tour of his company’s facility on San Francisco’s Folsom Street (see Late 2002), along with three other technicians from his Geary Street offices. The tour, Klein will later say, is to introduce the four technicians to the Folsom Street staff, “because they were obviously eventually planning to bring us over there.” Klein learns that the rumors of a “secret room” in the facility are true (see Fall 2002). The secret room is on the facility’s sixth floor and is being built to house some sort of equipment, but Klein is unsure exactly what that equipment might be. Klein and the others see the outer door of the secret room, and a workman working on the door “suddenly [began talking to Klein and his colleages in a] very low voice like he didn’t want to be overheard. He felt like this was something secret, you know, and he didn’t know much about it, and he was saying: ‘None of us can go in there. It’s all secret.’ This was not only an affront to the technicians; it was a violation of union rules, because they were obviously planning to install telecommunications equipment, which is supposed to be the jurisdiction of the union technicians. We had a contract. So the technicians were not only angry about this secret thing that they’re not let in on, but also the fact that there’s work there that they’re excluded from. And they were told nothing about it. So that was it.” Klein is further surprised to learn that only a single non-union technician (whom he only identifies as “Ski,” an AT&T “field support specialist” who has been granted a security clearance by the National Security Agency (NSA)), is allowed to work in the secure room. No union technicians are allowed in, even though the installation work being done is specifically contracted to the union workers. “The regular technician work force was not allowed in the room,” Klein will later state. Klein deduces that this secret room is the long-rumored NSA installation he has been hearing about. Moreover, he notes with some alarm that the room is next door to the 4ESS phone switch, “the traditional workhorse used for AT&T long-distance calls.” Klein will write, “Now my mental alarm bells were ringing, but for the moment there was nothing to do but take some mental notes, particularly since it was not clear exactly what they [the NSA and AT&T] were doing.” [Wired News, 4/7/2006; Democracy Now!, 5/12/2006; PBS Frontline, 5/15/2007; Klein, 2009, pp. 26-28] Klein will explain that he chooses not to say anything about his concerns because he is “scared for several reasons, one being, well, this is obviously secret. This is obviously some federal government secret operation that they don’t want nosy people nosing around in, and if I started asking questions I could get into trouble. Furthermore, our jobs were in jeopardy anyway, because [we] were always getting wind that they were planning to close our previous office at Geary Street, and I didn’t need to give them an excuse to fire me. So I thought after thinking about it that the best thing to do is not to say anything and just watch it.” [PBS Frontline, 5/15/2007] He later learns that similar cabinets are being installed in AT&T centers in other cities, including Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles, and San Diego (see Late 2003). [Wired News, 4/7/2006] The Folsom Street facility is apparently connected to a more central surveillance facility operated out of one of AT&T’s main command centers in Missouri (see Late 2002-Early 2003).

Senior AT&T technician Mark Klein (see July 7, 2009), working near the National Security Agency (NSA)‘s “secret room” in the firm’s Folsom Street, San Francisco facility (see October 2003), receives two documents pertaining to the equipment in that secret room. (In a 2007 interview with PBS, Klein will cite a third document as well, that he found lying on top of a router.) The two documents are entitled “SIMS Splitter Cut-In and Test Procedure Issue 2, 01/12/03” and “SIMS Splitter Cut-In and Test Procedure OSWF Training Issue 2 January 24, 2002.” “OSWF” stands for “On-Site Work Force.” As for “SIMS,” all Klein knows is that it is an acronym associated with the secret room. Reading over the documents, Klein realizes that they indicate the secret room contains a “splitter cabinet,” installed in February 2003 (see February 2003), containing “optical splitters” that “cut in” to signals sent through 16 “Peering Links” between AT&T and 16 other major carriers and Internet exchange points. He later recalls: “I brought them back to my desk, and when I started looking at it, I looked at it more, and I looked at it more, and finally it dawned on me sort of all at once, and I almost fell out of my chair, because this showed, first of all, what they had done, that they had taken working circuits, which had nothing to do with a splitter cabinet, and they had taken in particular what are called peering links which connect AT&T’s network with the other networks. It’s how you get the Internet, right? One network connects with another. So they took 16 high-speed peering links which go to places like Qwest [Communications] and Palo Alto Internet Exchange and places like that.… These circuits were working at one point, and the documents indicated in February 2003 they had cut into these circuits so that they could insert the splitter so that they can get the data flow from these circuits to go to the secret room. So this data flow meant that they were getting not only AT&T customers’ data flow; they were getting everybody else’s data flow, whoever else might happen to be communicating into the AT&T network from other networks. So it was turning out to be like a large chunk of the network, of the Internet.” The documents, he later says, name “the circuit IDs… the companies they belong to… [and] the cut date. And they were all in February [2003], when they were cut into the splitter” (see February 2003). The 16 carriers include ConXion, Verio, XO, Genuity, Qwest, PAIX (Palo Alto Internet Exchange), Allegiance, Abovenet, Global Crossing, C&W, UUNET, Level 3, Sprint, Telia, PSINet, and MAE West (the Metropolitan Area Exchange for AT&T’s Western region). In plain English, the splitter in the NSA room is duplicating the electronic data being sent through AT&T’s equipment, and sending the duplicated signals somewhere else, presumably to NSA computers for later processing. Klein is given the documents by a veteran AT&T technician who is preparing to retire. Klein, in a casual conversation with the colleague who gave him the documents, remarks, “It seems obvious to me, given that the secret room is next to the 4ESS (see January 2003), that they’re listening to phone calls.” Klein’s colleague shakes his head and says: “No, Internet.… I’ll show you.” (In 2007 Klein will learn from a telecommunications expert that since AT&T was transferring its long-distance telephone traffic onto Internet fiber cables, the splitter was most likely picking up both telephone and Internet traffic.) Klein’s colleague shows him the cabinet containing the splitters. Klein later tells a reporter: “[T]here were optical splitters, which basically were connected by fiber-optic cable down to the secret room on the sixth floor.… The analogy I can give you, which most people are familiar with is, say you get cable TV in your living room and then want to watch all the channels you get in the living room, you want to get all those same channels in your bedroom. So they install on the cable what they call a splitter, which splits off all the signals, duplicates of the same signals which go to the bedroom.… What the splitter does is make a duplicate copy of all the signals going across the fiber-optic cables.… We’re talking about billions and billions of bits of data going across every second, right? And it’s going into the router, and it’s coming back from the routers in that office. So what they do with the splitter is they intercept that data stream and make copies of all the data, and those copies go down on the cable to the secret room.” Klein confirms from his colleague and from the documents that show the splitters are connected directly to the equipment in the secret room. [PBS Frontline, 5/15/2007; Klein, 2009, pp. 34-35]

A portion of the outer door of AT&T’s Folsom Street facility. [Source: Wired News]Senior AT&T technician Mark Klein (see July 7, 2009), newly assigned to the company’s Folsom Street facility in San Francisco, is tasked to work at the seventh floor “Internet room,” where AT&T manages much of its domestic Internet traffic. Klein is intensely curious about the National Security Agency’s “secret room” on the sixth floor (see January 2003). The NSA room has two doors, both labeled “641A,” and is in reality what Klein will later term “a room within a room,” with the outer room filled with ordinary “computer equipment for mundane corporate uses.” He does not know what is in the inner “secret” room. Klein will later write, “While working in the outer room, you could walk around three sides of the secret room, which I measured to be about 24 by 48 feet.” An outer door leads from Room 641A to the 4ESS switchroom, which AT&T uses to manage its long-distance telephone communications. The rooms are connected by “row after row of equipment and a tangle of cabling going up and across the ceiling.” Klein learns that the NSA room is sometimes called “the SIMS room,” an acronym of which no one seems to know the meaning. [PBS Frontline, 5/15/2007; Klein, 2009, pp. 32-34] Klein will later describe his job at the Folsom Street facility as working with the phone switch equipment on the sixth floor, “which handled the public’s telephone calls and was the workhorse of the phone system.… My main assignment was to oversee the Internet room, and that meant keeping it going. If there were any trouble calls, I had to answer them. If there’s any upgrading work to do, I had to either do it or arrange for others to do it in off hours. Just oversee the flow of work in the Internet room and watch things.” He also spends a tremendous amount of time on the seventh floor, “where the Internet room was.… That’s where there are a lot of Cisco routers, a lot of fiber-optic lines coming in and going out.” The Folsom Street facility serves the Bay Area as well as much of Western America. According to Klein: “There’s lots of Internet traffic, as you can imagine, that goes in and out of this office, probably hundreds of fiber-optic lines that go out, carrying billions—that’s billions with a ‘B’—billions of bits of data going in and out every second every day. So all the Web surfing you’re doing, whatever you’re doing on the Internet—the pictures, the video, the Voice over Internet—all that stuff’s going in and out of there. And then of course there’s also the traditional phone switch, which is doing what it’s been doing since before the Internet.… Handling millions and millions of phone calls, right. That’s its job.” [PBS Frontline, 5/15/2007]

Senior AT&T technician Mark Klein (see July 7, 2009), working at the company’s Folsom Street facility in San Francisco one floor above the National Security Agency’s “secret room” monitoring the company’s Internet communications (see October 2003 and Fall 2003), is given a technical document to pass on to the secret room’s AT&T supervisor, a man Klein will identify only as “Ski” (see Summer 2002 and January 2003). Klein flips through the non-classified document, titled “Study Group 3 LGX/Splitter Wiring San Francisco Issue 1 12/10/02.” (LGX, Klein will later explain, refers to “Lucent LightGuide patch panels.”) He finds the document astonishing. It confirms, he will later write, “that the splitter cabinet in the 7th floor Internet room [his workstation] was directly connected to panels in the 6th floor secret room, which was referred to as the ‘SG3 Secure Room.’” Documents he has previously read (see Fall 2003) “made repeated references to the ‘Splitter,’ ‘Splitter Cabinet,’ or other descriptions which made it clear that the three documents were linked together.” Klein deduces that “SG3” stands for “Study Group 3,” an appellation he will write was chosen in “an apparent attempt to make a sinister operation look innocent.” And, since San Francisco is the site of the third study group, he deduces there must be at least two other study groups, presumably in different cities, “a fact,” he will write, “which was soon confirmed to me. I had a hand on only one small part of a giant octopus.” Klein pores more closely over the documents to try to learn exactly what AT&T and the NSA are doing, and soon finds a reference to a “Narus STA 6400.” He has no idea what this piece of equipment is, but he quickly learns that it is, as he will write, “a very sophisticated and specialized product that not only was perfectly suited for sorting through the data stream in real time looking for things, but… was already being marketed specifically to telecommunications and other companies for intelligence and police spying.” [AT&T, 12/10/2002; AT&T, 1/13/2003; AT&T, 1/24/2003; Klein, 2009, pp. 35-37] Later, Klein will describe the Narus STA 6400 as “not only designed for high-speed sifting through high-speed volumes of data, looking for something according to various program algorithms, something you’d think would be perfect for a spy agency.” [PBS Frontline, 5/15/2007]

A sample page from Mark Klein’s AT&T documentation. [Source: Mark Klein / Seattle Times]Senior AT&T technician Mark Klein (see July 7, 2009), gravely concerned by the National Security Agency (NSA) spying operation going on in AT&T’s San Francisco facility (see October 2003) and now in possession of documents which prove the nature and scope of the telecommunications surveillance activities (see Fall 2003 and Late 2003), writes a memo summarizing his findings and conclusions. He appends eight pages of the unclassified documents he has in his possession, along with two photographs and some material from the Internet which documents the sophisticated surveillance equipment being used to gather data from AT&T’s electronic transmissions. The NSA and AT&T were, he later says, “basically sweeping up, vacuum-cleaning the Internet through all the data, sweeping it all into this secret room.… It’s the sort of thing that very intrusive, repressive governments would do, finding out about everybody’s personal data without a warrant. I knew right away that this was illegal and unconstitutional, and yet they were doing it.… I think I’m looking at something Orwellian. It’s a government, many-tentacled operation to gather daily information on what everybody in the country is doing. Your daily transactions on the Internet can be monitored with this kind of system, not just your Web surfing. All kinds of business that people do on the Internet these days—your bank transactions, your email, everything—it sort of opens a window into your entire private life, and that’s why I thought of the term ‘Orwellian.’ As you know, in [George] Orwell’s story [1984], they have cameras in your house, watching you. Well, this is the next best thing.… So I was not only angry about it; I was also scared, because I knew this authorization came from very high up—not only high up in AT&T, but high up in the government. So I was in a bit of a quandary as to what to do about it, but I thought this should be halted.” Gathering 'the Entire Data Stream' - In his memo, Klein concludes that the NSA is using “splitter” equipment to copy “the entire data stream [emphasis in the original] and sent it to the [NSA’s] secret room for further analysis.” Klein writes that the splitters actually “split off a percentage of the light signal [from the fiber optic circuits] so it can be examined. This is the purpose of the special cabinet… circuits are connected into it, the light signal is split into two signals, one of which is diverted to the ‘secret room.’ The cabinet is totally unnecessary for the circuit to perform—in fact, it introduces problems since the signal level is reduced by the splitter—its only purpose is to enable a third party [the NSA] to examine the data flowing between sender and recipient on the Internet.” (Emphasis in the original.) In his book, Klein will explain that “each separate signal,” after being split, “contains all the information, nothing is lost, so in effect the entire data stream has been copied.” He will continue: “What screams out at you when examining this physical arrangement is that the NSA was vacuuming up everything flowing in the Internet stream: email, Web browsing, voice-over-Internet phone calls, pictures, streaming video, you name it. The splitter has no intelligence at all, it just makes a blind copy.” Klein later explains to a reporter: “The signals that go across fiber optics are laser light signals. It’s light basically that runs through a fiber optic, which is a clear glass fiber, and it has to be at a certain level for the routers to see the light and interpret the data correctly. If the light gets too low, just as if you get a weak flashlight with bad batteries, at a certain point it doesn’t work. If the light level drops too low, the router starts dropping bits and getting errors, and eventually you get loss of signal, and it just doesn’t work at all.… The effect of the splitter is to reduce the strength of the signal, and that may or may not cause a problem, depending on how much the signal is reduced.” A telecommunications company would not, as a rule, use such a splitter on its backbone Internet traffic because of the risk of degraded signal quality. “You want to have as few connections on your main data lines as possible,” Klein will say, “because each connection reduces the signal strength, and a splitter is a connection, and if you can avoid that, all the better.” Inherently Illegal - Klein will explain that there is no way these activities are legal: “There could not possibly be a legal warrant for this, since according to the Fourth Amendment, warrants have to be specific, ‘particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.’ It was also a blatant violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act [FISA—see 1978], which calls for specific warrants as required by the Fourth Amendment. This was a massive blind copying of the communications of millions of people, foreign and domestic, randomly mixed together. From a legal standpoint, it does not matter what they claim to throw away later in their secret rooms, the violation has already occurred at the splitter.” [AT&T, 12/10/2002; AT&T, 1/13/2003; AT&T, 1/24/2003; Wired News, 5/22/2006; PBS Frontline, 5/15/2007; Klein, 2009, pp. 37, 119-133]The Narus STA 6400 - Klein discusses one key piece of equipment in the NSA’s secret room, the Narus STA 6400 (see Late 2003). Narus is a firm that routinely sells its equipment not only to telecom firms such as AT&T, “but also to police, military, and intelligence officials” (see November 13-14, 2003). Quoting an April 2000 article in Telecommunications magazine, Klein writes that the STA 6400 is a group of signal “traffic analyzers that collect network and customer usage information in real time directly from the message.… These analyzers sit on the message pipe into the ISP [Internet Service Provider] cloud rather than tap into each router or ISP device.” Klein quotes a 1999 Narus press release that says its Semantic Traffic Analysis (STA) technology “captures comprehensive customer usage data… and transforms it into actionable information… [it] is the only technology that provides complete visibility for all Internet applications.” The Narus hardware allows the NSA “to look at the content of every data packet going by, not just the addressing information,” Klein will later write. A 'Dream Machine for a Police State' - Klein later writes of the Narus STA 6400: “It is the dream machine of a police state, one that even George Orwell could not imagine. Not only does it enable the government to see what millions of people are saying and doing every day, but it can build up a database which reveals the connections among social groups—who’s calling and emailing whom. Such a device can easily be turned against all dissident protest groups, and even the Democratic and Republican parties, with devastating effect. And it’s in the hands of the executive power, in total secrecy.” [AT&T, 12/10/2002; AT&T, 1/13/2003; AT&T, 1/24/2003; Wired News, 5/22/2006; Klein, 2009, pp. 37-40] In support of the memo and an ensuing lawsuit against AT&T (see January 31, 2006), Klein will later write: “Despite what we are hearing, and considering the public track record of this administration, I simply do not believe their claims that the NSA’s spying program is really limited to foreign communications or is otherwise consistent with the NSA’s charter or with FISA. And unlike the controversy over targeted wiretaps of individuals’ phone calls, this potential spying appears to be applied wholesale to all sorts of Internet communications of countless citizens.” [Wired News, 4/7/2006]

Senior AT&T technician Mark Klein (see July 7, 2009) accepts a buyout package from his firm and retires. Klein, disheartened by the illegal AT&T/NSA wiretapping operation he has documented (see January 16, 2004), decides to keep the documents he has collected over the years (see Fall 2003 and Late 2003), the “hard proof” of the operation, he will later write, “in case there was some change in the political winds that would enable me to come forward and expose… the crimes which I knew were being committed.” [Klein, 2009, pp. 44]

Retired AT&T technician Mark Klein (see July 7, 2009 and May 2004) is gladdened to see the New York Times’s reports on the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program (see December 15, 2005 and December 24, 2005). Klein has known since 2002 that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been using AT&T facilities to illegally eavesdrop on American citizens’ telephone and Internet communications (see Late 2002, January 2003, October 2003, Fall 2003, Late 2003, Late 2003, and January 16, 2004). He has considered going public with his knowledge, but has so far refrained because, he will later explain, “[t]he atmosphere was still kind of scary.” He will later say of the Times report, “They seemed to be talking mainly about phone calls, but anyway, it was revealed that there was an illegal spying program going on, and I thought, ‘Ah, this would probably blow the whole thing,’ and I thought it would all come out, and I don’t need to do anything.” However, Klein is horrified to see the government’s response. He will say: “[W]hat came out was the government turned around and went on the offensive against anybody who would dare to criticize them.… They’re issuing threats: Anyone who has a security clearance and spills any beans here is in for prosecution. That was deliberately said by them several times on TV to intimidate anybody in, say, the NSA who knew the truth, intimidate them so they would not come forward. So that silenced anybody in the intelligence community” (see December 17, 2005, December 19, 2005, December 21, 2005, December 30, 2005, and January 25-26, 2006). In his 2009 book Wiring Up the Big Brother Machine… and Fighting It, Klein will write that the Justice Department’s December 2005 investigation into the leak of classified information that led to the Times reports (see December 30, 2005) “was obviously intended to silence Congress, the media, and any potential whistleblowers inside the NSA who might have been tempted to come forward. The administration was manipulating the secrecy oath which people had taken to get security clearances, turning it into a weapon to silence anyone who had knowledge of wrongdoing.” Klein decides that he must come forward. He never received a security clearance, so he cannot be threatened with legal action over violating such clearance. He will explain: “All I had and still have are some company documents and some knowledge of some illicit NSA installation at AT&T’s network. And if anybody—say, Congress—was willing to follow the trail, I can give them all the names they want, and they can go up the hierarchy of AT&T all the way up to Dave Dorman, who was the president back then, and they can go even higher, and they can find out who is responsible for this, and they can ask them under oath and subpoena what the heck is going on here, if they had the will to do it.” Klein later admits to some hesitation and trepidation at undertaking such an effort, and will cite the “McCarthyite” atmosphere he says the government has created in which “dissidents become the target of a lynch mob searching for ‘terrorists.’” But, he will write, he believes the Times stories are “a political indication of a shift at the top of government, a split of some kind which could provide an opening.… Maybe they would publish my material, I thought, and that would provide some protection.” By December 31, Klein writes a preface to his memo from almost two years before (see January 16, 2004 and December 31, 2005). [PBS Frontline, 5/15/2007; Klein, 2009, pp. 52-53]

Retired AT&T technician Mark Klein (see July 7, 2009 and May 2004), angered by the Bush administration’s counterattack against government and media members who have helped to expose its warrantless wiretapping operation (see December 15-31, 2005), decides to go public with a memo he wrote about his own knowledge of the collusion between AT&T and the National Security Agency (NSA) in eavesdropping on American citizens’ communications (see January 16, 2004). He updates the memo with a brief preface, selects eight pages of the 121 pages of AT&T documentation he possesses which he believes gives a good overview of the NSA’s surveillance equipment installation, and includes the two photographs he has taken of the NSA’s “secret room” at the AT&T facility in San Francisco and the Internet research he has done on the Narus STA 6400 equipment the NSA is using to sort the communications being captured and recorded (see Late 2003). Instead of entrusting his newly refurbished memo to the Internet, he uses the PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) security protocol for anticipated dissemination, burns the data onto a CD, and begins searching online for civil liberties groups that might be interested in his work. [Wired News, 5/17/2006; Klein, 2009, pp. 53-55]

Expert witness J. Scott Marcus, in an analysis submitted on behalf of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s lawsuit against AT&T (see January 31, 2006), notes that if the NSA had wanted to intercept only international electronic communications in its surveillance operations facilited by AT&T (see January 16, 2004), it would have placed “splitters” only at entry points such as ocean cable-head stations rather than in AT&T offices (see October 2003) in locations such as Atlanta and San Francisco (see Late 2003), where they would inevitably pick up huge amounts of domestic communications. Marcus, a former AT&T employee who held a top secret clearance when he was a consultant for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), writes: “The majority of international IP [Internet Protocol] traffic enters the United States at a limited number of locations, many of them in the areas of northern Virginia, Silicon Valley, New York, and (for Latin America) south Florida. This deployment, however, is neither modest nor limited, and it apparently involves considerably more locations that would be required to catch the majority of international traffic.” (Emphasis in original.) Marcus continues: “I conclude that the designers of the SG3 Configuration (see Late 2003) made no attempt, in terms of the location or position of the fiber split, to exclude data sources primarily comprised of domestic data.… Once the data has been diverted, there is nothing in the data that reliably and unambiguously distinguishes whether the destination is domestic or foreign.” Marcus estimates that the NSA has 15 to 20 sites in AT&T facilities around the country, and says, “a substantial fraction, probably well over half, of AT&T’s purely domestic traffic was diverted.” Former senior AT&T technician Mark Klein (see July 7, 2009 and May 2004) will later write, “Though Marcus refrained from drawing the obvious conclusion, the facts strongly suggest that this entire apparatus was designed for domestic spying.” (Emphasis in original). [Klein, 2009, pp. 49-50, 71] Klein will also write that Marcus’s expertise “was at a much higher level than mine.” Klein will later write that he is pleased that Marcus’s statement validates and supports his own documentation and conclusions. [Klein, 2009, pp. 71]

The Justice Department demands that it be allowed to review evidence obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) from retired AT&T technician Mark Klein (see February 23-28, 2006). The EFF is preparing to submit the evidence under regular court seal to presiding Judge Vaughn Walker. Neither the Justice Department nor any other government agency is a named defendant in the EFF’s lawsuit against AT&T for its allegedly illegal behavior in working with the National Security Agency (NSA) to conduct warrantless surveillance against American citizens (see January 31, 2006). Even so, lawyers from the Justice Department say they want to see if Klein’s documentation contains classified information (it does not—see Late 2003), and if so, they intend to place Klein’s documentation into a “sensitive compartmented information facility,” which would mean it would not be kept at the courthouse but in the possession of government agents at a secure location. Such classification would make the legal proceedings more difficult for both Judge Walker and the EFF lawyers. However, the request piques the interest of the national media, and reporters begin “flooding” Klein and the EFF with requests for information and interviews. [Klein, 2009, pp. 65-66] Ironically, two news outlets, the Los Angeles Times and New York Times, have all but shunned Klein before now (see February 11, 2006 and After and Mid-February - Late March, 2006). On April 4, after perusing the documents, the government lawyers return them to Walker with approval from senior Justice Department lawyer Anthony J. Coppolino to file them under ordinary court seal. Klein will later write that Coppolino’s acquiescence will undermine the government’s later efforts to have the lawsuit dismissed under the “state secrets” provision (see Late May, 2006). [Klein, 2009, pp. 66] In June 2007, the online technical news site Wired News will publish the documents after they are released by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (see June 13, 2007) under the headline “AT&T ‘Spy Room’ Documents Unsealed; You’ve Already Seen Them.” Wired previously published them in May 2006 (see May 17, 2006), and PBS’s Frontline also published them as part of a televised documentary on Klein and the eavesdropping program. [Wired News, 6/13/2007]

AT&T attorney Michael Kellogg enters the courtroom. [Source: Wired News]The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco hears two related cases: one a government appeal to dismiss a case brought against AT&T for its involvement in the National Security Agency (NSA)‘s domestic wiretapping program (see July 20, 2006), and the other a challenge to the government’s authority to wiretap overseas phone calls brought on behalf of a now-defunct Islamic charity, Al Haramain (see February 28, 2006). The AT&T lawsuit is brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (see January 31, 2006). Among the onlookers is AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein (see December 15-31, 2005 and July 7, 2009), who has provided key documentation for the EFF lawsuit (see Early January 2006). Government Lawyer: Court Should Grant 'Utmost Deference' to Bush Administration - Deputy Solicitor General Gregory Garre, arguing on behalf of the US government, tells Judge Harry Pregerson, one of the three judges presiding over the court, that allowing the EFF lawsuit against AT&T to go forward would result in “exceptionally grave harm to national security in the United States,” even though a previous judge has ruled otherwise (see July 20, 2006) and the government itself has admitted that none of the material to be used by EFF is classified as any sort of state secret (see June 23, 2006). Pregerson says that granting such a request would essentially make his court a “rubber stamp” for the government, to which Garre argues that Pregerson should grant the “utmost deference” to the Bush administration. Pregerson retorts: “What does utmost deference mean? Bow to it?” [Wired News, 8/15/2007] Klein will later accuse Garre of using “scare tactics” to attempt to intimidate the judges into finding in favor of AT&T and the government. [Klein, 2009, pp. 79]Government Refuses to Swear that Domestic Surveillance Program Operates under Warrant - Garre says that the goverment’s domestic surveillance program operates entirely under judicial warrant; he says the government is not willing to sign a sworn affidavit to that effect. Reporter Kevin Poulsen, writing for Wired News, says that Garre’s admission of the government’s reluctance to swear that its domestic surveillance program operates with warrants troubles all three judges. AT&T attorney Michael Kellogg argues that AT&T customers have no proof that their communications are being given over to the government without warrants, and therefore the EFF lawsuit should be dismissed. “The government has said that whatever AT&T is doing with the government is a state secret,” Kellogg says. “As a consequence, no evidence can come in whether the individuals’ communications were ever accepted or whether we played any role in it.” EFF attorney Robert Fram argues that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) allows citizens to challenge electronic surveillance by permitting courts to hear government evidence in chambers. He is careful, Poulsen writes, to note that EFF does not want specific information on the NSA’s sources and methods, and says that EFF already has enough evidence to prove its assertion that AT&T compromised its customers’ privacy by colluding with the NSA’s domestic surveillance program. Government Mocks Whistleblower's AT&T Documentation - Garre mocks Klein’s AT&T documents, saying that all they prove is that the NSA’s secret room in AT&T’s San Francisco facility (see Late 2002-Early 2003, January 2003, and October 2003) “has a leaky air conditioner and some loose cables in the room.” Fram counters that Klein’s documentation is specific and damning. It proves that the NSA housed a splitter cabinet in that secret room that “split” data signals, allowing the NSA to wiretap literally millions of domestic communications without the knowledge of AT&T customers (see February 2003, Fall 2003, Late 2003, and Late 2003). Fram says Klein’s documents, along with other non-classified documentation EFF has presented, proves “the privacy violation on the handover of the Internet traffic at the splitter into the secret room, which room has limited access to NSA-cleared employees. What is not part of our claim is what happens inside that room.” Klein’s documentation proves the collusion between AT&T and the NSA, Fram states, but Judge M. Margaret McKeown questions this conclusion. According to Poulsen, McKeown seems more willing to grant the government the argument that it must protect “state secrets” than Pregerson. Government Argues for Dismissal of Al Haramain Case - As in the AT&T portion of the appeal hearing, the government, represented by Assistant US Attorney General Thomas Brody, argues for the Al Haramain lawsuit’s dismissal, saying, “The state secrets privilege requires dismissal of this case.” Even the determination as to whether Al Haramain was spied upon, he argues, “is itself a state secret.” The Top Secret government document that Al Haramain is using as the foundation of its case is too secret to be used in court, Brody argues, even though the government itself accidentally provided the charity with the document. Even the plaintiff’s memories of the document constitute “state secrets” and should be disallowed, Brody continues. “This document is totally non-redactable and non-segregable and cannot even be meaningfully described,” he says. A disconcerted Judge McKeown says, “I feel like I’m in Alice and Wonderland.” Brody concludes that it is possible the Al Haramain attorneys “think or believe or claim they were surveilled. It’s entirely possible that everything they think they know is entirely false.” [Wired News, 8/15/2007]No Rulings Issued - The appeals court declines to rule on either case at this time. Klein will later write, “It was clear to everyone that this panel would, if they ever issued a ruling, deny the ‘state secrets’ claim and give the green light for the EFF lawsuit to go forward.” [Klein, 2009, pp. 79-81] Wired News’s Ryan Singel writes that the panel seems far more sympathetic to the EFF case than the Al Haramain case. The judges seem dismayed that the government fails to prove that no domestic surveillance program actually exists in the EFF matter. However, they seem far more willing to listen to the government’s case in the Al Haramain matter, even though McKeown says that the government’s argument has an “Alice in Wonderland” feel to it. Singel believes the government is likely to throw out the secret document Al Haramain uses as the foundation of its case. However, he writes, “all three judges seemed to believe that the government could confirm or deny a secret intelligence relationship with the nation’s largest telecom, without disclosing secrets to the world.… So seemingly, in the eyes of today’s panel of judges, in the collision between secret documents and the state secrets privilege, ‘totally secret’ documents are not allowed to play, but sort-of-secret documents—the AT&T documents—may be able to trump the power of kings to do as they will.” [Wired News, 8/15/2007] Wired News’s David Kravets notes that whichever way the court eventually rules, the losing side will continue the appeals process, probably all the way to the US Supreme Court. The biggest question, he says, is whether the NSA is still spying on millions of Americans. [Wired News, 8/15/2007]

Room 641A, the NSA’s secret room at AT&T’s Folsom Street facility. [Source: Wired]Former AT&T network technician Mark Klein (see December 15-31, 2005 and July 7, 2009) gives a press conference with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in Washington, DC, in an effort to lobby Congress and prevent an immunity bill for the telecoms from passing. The next day, Klein appears in the audience during a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting as part of his lobbying effort in Washington to reveal his knowledge of a secret NSA electronic surveillance operation at AT&T’s San Francisco operations center (see January 2003). The NSA has monitored an enormous volume of telephone and Internet traffic through this secret operation. “I have first-hand knowledge of the clandestine collaboration between one giant telecommunications company, AT&T, and the National Security Agency to facilitate the most comprehensive illegal domestic spying program in history,” Klein tells reporters. “I think they committed a massive violation not only of the law but of the Constitution. That’s not the way the Fourth Amendment is supposed to work.” [New York Times, 11/6/2007; BetaNews, 11/8/2007; Democracy Now!, 7/7/2008] Klein states his four main points of information: that AT&T provided the NSA with all varieties of electronic communications, from telephone conversations to emails, text messages, Web browsing activities, and more; AT&T provided the NSA with billions of purely domestic communications; the program involved everyone using the Internet and not just AT&T customers, because of the interconnected nature of the Internet; and AT&T had 15 to 20 NSA “spy rooms” in facilities across the nation. Brian Reid, a telecommunications and data networking expert who served as one of the New York Times’s experts on the NSA allegations (see April 12, 2006), appears with Klein at the press conference. Reid told Klein in the days before the conference, “My job is to make people believe you.” Reid tells reporters, “The most likely use of this [AT&T/NSA] infrastructure is wholesale, untargeted surveillance of ordinary Americans at the behest of the NSA.” Hours after the press conference, Klein appears as a guest on MSNBC’s political talk show Countdown, where host Keith Olbermann asks him if his experience “felt like finding yourself in a scene from the sci-fi flick Invasion of the Body Snatchers—did it have that sort of horror quality to it?” Klein replies, “My thought was George Orwell’s 1984 and here I am being forced to connect the Big Brother machine.” [Klein, 2009, pp. 93-100]Key Witness - Klein is a key witness in the lawsuit against AT&T by the EFF (see January 31, 2006 and Early January 2006). He is offering to testify against efforts by the Bush administration and its Congressional Republican allies to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to grant immunity to telecom companies like AT&T from prosecution for surveillance acts. Such an immunity grant would likely result in the dismissal of such lawsuits. But no committee of Congress invites him to testify. [New York Times, 11/6/2007; BetaNews, 11/8/2007; Democracy Now!, 7/7/2008]NSA Secure Room - Part of Klein’s information is from a deposition that was entered into evidence in the lawsuit, and is now made available to individual members of Congress (see February 23-28, 2006, June 26, 2006, and June 13, 2007). Klein relates that during a tour of the AT&T-controlled floors of the Folsom Street facility of what was then SBC Communications, he saw Room 641A, categorized as the “SG3Secure Room” (see October 2003 and Late 2003). That fall, when he was hired to work at the facility, he saw an NSA agent who came to interview a field support specialist for clearance to be able to work in the Secure Room. “To my knowledge, only employees cleared by the NSA were permitted to enter the SG3 Secure Room,” Klein says. “To gain entry to the SG3 Secure Room required both a physical key for the cylinder lock and a combination code number to be entered into an electronic keypad on the door. To my knowledge, only [two field support specialists] had both the key and the combination code.” Klein installed new circuits to a fiber-optic “splitter cabinet” that had only one purpose: to duplicate Internet traffic from WorldNet’s service into SG3, thereby allowing the NSA access to all traffic on that circuit. “What I saw is that everything’s flowing across the Internet to this government-controlled room,” he now says. [New York Times, 11/6/2007; BetaNews, 11/8/2007]EFF Lobbyists - The EFF secures the services of two professional lobbyists, Adam Eisgrau and former Congressman Thomas Downey (D-NY), who escort Klein and EFF officials Cindy Cohn and Kevin Bankston around Capitol Hill during the two-day period. EFF also works with a professional media company to prepare the media for the November 7 press conference. After the conference, Klein is introduced to a number of Democratic lawmakers, though he says only a few are truly interested in his evidence; he names Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Representative Rush Holt (D-NJ), a former physicist who had actually worked with some of the technology Klein cites in his statements, as two of those willing to give him more than a handshake and a quick photo opportunity. Klein later regrets being unable to meet with Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT), whom he considers to be one of the few real champions of civil liberties in Congress. Dodd cited Klein’s evidence, and Klein by name, in his unsuccessful filibuster of the FISA amendment bill (see July 10, 2008). [Klein, 2009, pp. 91-95] The lobbyists are able to gain access for Klein to the Congressional hearings. Some media outlets later report, mistakenly, that Klein actually testifies before the panel. [Klein, 2009, pp. 100-101]

The cover of Mark Klein’s ‘Wiring Up the Big Brother Machine… and Fighting It.’ [Source: BookSurge / aLibris (.com)]Former AT&T technician Mark Klein self-publishes his book, Wiring Up the Big Brother Machine… and Fighting It. In his acknowledgements, Klein writes that he chose to self-publish (through BookSurge, a pay-to-publish venue) because “[t]he big publishers never called me,” and the single small publishing house that offered to publish his book added “an unacceptable requirement to cut core material.” Klein based his book on his experiences as an AT&T engineer at the telecom giant’s San Francisco facility, where he primarily worked with AT&T’s Internet service. In 2002 and 2003, Klein witnessed the construction of of a “secret room,” a facility within the facility that was used by the National Security Agency (NSA) to gather billions of email, telephone, VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol), and text messages, most of which were sent by ordinary Americans. The NSA did its electronic surveillance, Klein writes, secretly and without court warrants. Klein describes himself as “wiring up the Big Brother machine,” and was so concerned about the potential illegality and constitutional violations of the NSA’s actions (with AT&T’s active complicity) that he retained a number of non-classified documents proving the extent of the communications “vacuuming” being done. Klein later used those documents to warn a number of reporters, Congressional members, and judges of what he considered a horrific breach of Americans’ right to privacy. [Klein, 2009, pp. 9-11, 21-24, 33, 35, 38, 40] In 2007, Klein described his job with the firm as “basically to keep the systems going. I worked at AT&T for 22 and a half years. My job was basically to keep the systems going. They were computer systems, network communication systems, Internet equipment, Voice over Internet [Protocol (VoIP)] equipment. I tested circuits long distance across the country. That was my job: to keep the network up.” He explained why he chose to become a “whistleblower:” “Because I remember the last time this happened.… I did my share of anti-war marches when that was an active thing back in the ‘60s, and I remember the violations and traffic transgressions that the government pulled back then for a war that turned out to be wrong, and a lot of innocent people got killed over it. And I’m seeing all this happening again, only worse. When the [NSA] got caught in the ‘70s doing domestic spying, it was a big scandal, and that’s why Congress passed the FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] law, as you know, to supposedly take care of that (see 1978). So I remember all that. And the only way any law is worth anything is if there’s a memory so that people can say: ‘Wait a minute. This happened before.’ And you’ve got to step forward and say: ‘I remember this. This is the same bad thing happening again, and there should be a halt to it.’ And I’m a little bit of that institutional memory in the country; that’s all.” [PBS Frontline, 5/15/2007]

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